Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Saturday, November 25, 2006

One of the biggest challenges big organizations struggle with is the
imperfection, the stubborn refusal of actual events to match up perfectly with
plans made. Baseball is extraordinarily good at improvising contingency plans
compared to the norm in any other industry. And one of the outstanding
practitioners within baseball is Pat
Gillick, the senior sitting GM, if my quick research is correct. He had cut
his teeth as a minor league pitcher in the the most innovative organization of
the 1950s, Paul Richards' Baltimore Orioles, and then started his management
career in Richards' Houston Colt .45s. Since 1978 (with three one-year hiatii),
he's been a GM for the Blue Jays, Orioles and Mariners, and last year he came
out of retirement to take on his first National League assignment, the
Philadelphia Phillies.

The rumor was, he really really wanted to retire and that his
frustration of the last couple of years working for the Seattle Mariners
challenging ownership team had left a bad taste in his mouth. The rumor was that
he wanted a retirement on a high note, like a World Series to go along with the
pair he got with the early 90s Blue Jays. I spoke with him at last year'
GMs meeting about his goals, and while he's too much of a gentleman to
trash-talk about even the worst employers he's had, he left me with the clear
impression that the rumors reflected the essential truth of why he was taking on
a new management position. He could have chosen from a number of open positions,
but he told me chose the Phils because he wanted a quick return, not a long term
building project and the thought the Phils had a significant chance in 2006.

He was generous with his time this year at the GMs' meeting in Naples.
Specifically, we spoke of improvisation. His Phillies had had an unusual set of
circumstances and in Gillick's choices in guiding them showed a responsiveness,
a willingness to improvise that is a useful set of lessons for managers beyond
baseball. Because most teams either find themselves within striking distance of
the playoffs or out of practical contention by the significant (but not
impermeable) July 30 trading "deadline", teams frequently try to be
buyers of talent (even rent-a-body for the 1/3rd season left) to put them over
the top or sellers of talent looking to save salary and/or stock up on young
talent for future campaigns.

This year, Gillick executed both, being a seller around the July 30 when his
team looked cooked and then a buyer starting August 19 when the team looked
within striking distance of the wild card. Beyond baseball, a lot of managers might
have been able to bite the bullet on a campaign he wanted soooo badly, but very
few would have been able to pull the switch a second time, basically admitting
the initial contingency plan had proved imperfect.

Beyond baseball, too few organizations plan at all. Managers tend to pull
what I call a Stewk -- because one cannot have absolute confidence that
unfolding events will exactly match the set of conditions considered as
possibilities, they feel "why bother at all?". At the other pole,
there are managers who build five-year plans and have no "touch" for
figuring out what differences are significant and which irrelevant or cause for
a small fine-tune, and simply refuse to change the plan. In baseball, of course,
there are no Stewks at the major league level...this level of incompetence, so
common (perhaps 30% of managers in business and government) wouldn't get past
their first minor league gig in baseball. Building a baseball club (organization
& roster) from scratch, the way the Tampa Bay Devil Rays are trying to do is
a four- to six-year project, so the subtlety of fine-tuning or even improvising
in the face of the need for a bigger change is the ultimate challenge.

Planning for the future while trying to win in the present is a Holy Grail of
managing change, or Home Plate in the MBB
Model. Gillick's 2006 is a great example of how to do it and when and why.

To understand the environment Gillick was working in, you need to be familiar
with the specifics of the Phils' 2006 season. If you're already familiar with
it, skip the next section.

THE 2006 PHILLIES
They started the season 0-4, a blowout and three close ones. They then went
10-10, and at the end
of April, they were tied for second six games behind the hot 16-8 New York
Mets. They ripped off their first streak, starting May with eight wins, lost a
game to the Mets and then won four more. So by May
14th, they were 22-15, one game back. Things looked promising.

A 5-12 interleague record low-lighted the Phils stretch through July 1. By
that date they looked cooked. Not only where they buried divisionally (3rd
place, 12 games behind the Mets), but there were ten teams ahead of them for
the wild card (this from baseball-reference).

As I've written before sometimes it matters less how far behind you are than
how many teams are contending with you -- the math of everyone doing well enough
to knock each other off just right, of no one getting warm even if you get
torrid, makes it unlikely you can take the objective. Further, their runs-scored
and runs-allowed didn't hold out secret hopes they'd just been unlucky to get
that Infernal Gate -- they were about where they "should" have been,
based on their playing performance.

From there to July 29th, the day before the trade deadline, they went 10-10
(47-54 for the season), and the Philly phront office, phrought with the phantasy
they'd phailed, executed on their plan to sell off current assets for future
ones. The last week of July, they traded the phranchise player, Bobby Abreu (.277/.427/.434,
20 SBs) with starter Cory Lidle (21 starts, 8-7 record, 4.74 ERA) to the
Yankees, saving roughly $5.6 million in salary & acquiring four minor
leaguers. Cash and potential assets for the 2007 Campaign.

Gillick's front office team had already shed veterans David Bell, Sal Fasano,
and Rheal Cormier in separate deals that each brought a young player and saved
in the realm of a further $2.4 million in payroll.

But then, behold and lo...they spent the next three weeks going 12-6 and the
team chemistry seemed different. Young starter Cole Hamels got more
chances and looked good with them. Young batters like Shane Victorino &
Abraham Nunez were getting more chances and started producing, respectively, a
lot and a little more. Fourth outfielder David Dellucci started hitting up a
storm.

And of the teams ahead of them, only the Dodgers were playing very good ball.
It became conceivable the Phillies could contend.

So Gillick flipped the switch and started looking for pieces to complement
the revised squad.

On August 19, he swapped a pair of minor leaguers to his old team, the
Seattle Mariners, for one of the more consistent (not brilliant, but reliable)
veteran starters around, Jamie Moyer. Three days later he got interesting
utilityman Jose Hernandez and six days after that captured the services of Jeff
Conine, traditionally a nice platoon piece, and in nether case did he surrender
minor league talent. He'd increased the team's versatility by deepening the
bench and tweaked the pennant-race veteran quotient and for not a ton of money
(in the realm of $2.3 million).

While the team played out the rest of the season fairly well (26-17) they
finished out behind the NL West's second best for the wild card (though they
finished the season with a slightly better record than the NL Central's champion
Cardinals.

You don't get that much closer to a wild card than that. It made sense for
Gillick to consider the sell-off when he did, and it made sense (in 20-20
hindsight) for him to try to shell out some dollars three weeks later for a bit
of a run at the wild card.

Gillick's only disappointment, and it didn't sound very deep, is in the
quality of young talent they acquired in late July during their selling period
(see the interview below.

IMPROVISATION, PAT GILLICK STYLE
Here's the edited transcript (edited down to just the parts about improvisation)
of my conversation with Pat Gillick this November 15. He was pressed for time,
but very generous, and I thank him again for his willingness to chat.

Jeff Angus (JA): Improvisation. Most business are really bad at it. Baseball tends to be quite good at it. And you had a master stroke of improvisation this year when you sold your marquee player at the end of July but acquired four veterans after August 19. To the outside world it looked like you were cashing in your chips in late July, but when the team’s performance picked up, you changed course significantly.

Pat Gillick (PG): Well, I think in baseball things have changed dramatically. You have to be very flexible, you have to be able to move very quickly. Consequently you have to improvise. I think you have to be ready for everything. In baseball, because of free agency and
large contracts, things are not the way they were years ago; you have to be able to move, to improvise, to move at a moment’s notice.

JA: At some point of the season, one has to decide if you’re going to try to build up for a playoff run or sell off current value for easing the salary budget and for future
assets (Or neither). Who helps you decide, and when do you do that?

PG: Going into the season, the first 60 games are a feeling-out process. Not only for the manager and players, but it’s a time when you evaluate the personnel. After the first couple months of the season, you’ve gotten a pretty good idea of the people you want to retain on your club and the people who’d bet better served playing in another location.

JA: And then how well do you have to do for how long to have enough confidence …that it’s not just a little streak…and flip the switch back from selling to buying?

PG: It’s more of a gut call than anything else. I don’t know if you can put a
percentage on it.

JA: It’s intuitive, yes?

PG: It’s instinctual. It’s an instinct you get when you see the club on a daily basis and you evaluate the club and you get a feeling that you have to go in another direction.

JA: So you executed the late July sale, responded to the team’s improvement and bought pieces meant to improve gaps. Looking back, are you content with the way you played the hands you were dealt?

PG: (pauses) Yes. We gained a few things that gave us flexibility. In the exchange of players we probably didn’t come out with as much talent as we’d have liked to. But at the same time, last year provided the chance for some players to get some playing time who had not had much playing time in the first half of the season and who wouldn’t have had the opportunity otherwise. Shane Victorino, Abrham Nunez, Cole Hamels, Scott Mathieson. David Dellucci had been playing on a limted basis and he got a chance to play. About five of our players got more opportunities than they’d gotten the first 60, 90 days.
There were some pluses and some minuses. But I think overall the pluses probably outweighed the minuses.

JA: You haven’t been a GM in the National League before last year, right?

PG: I hadn’t. My whole career as a GM has been in the American. Since 1974. When I started out in 1963, I was in the National League. About 30 years. This is the first year.

JA: Did you find any subtle personnel decision differences where you had to catch yourself, prevent yourself falling into an A.L. pattern?

PG: No, not really. I think the people we have in (the front office in) Philadelphia…we planned it out well. The key difference is in the National League, you have to have a better bench because of the strategy around pitching changes. In the National League, when you make up your club you’ve got to have a better bench, because if you double-switch or when you pinch-hit for the pitcher a number of games…if it’s tied 1-1 in the 7th inning, in the American League you would likely let the pitcher pitch, and in the National you’ll need a pinch hitter.

JA: You draft a little differently, yes? As an American (League) team, you might draft a player who can’t play a position if he hits well enough. As a National League team, you wouldn’t draft, say, a
Juan Thomas
(a power-hitting DH not capable of playing 1b), no?

PG: No. I don’t think so.

JA: So it changes decisions in a fine way.
Another need to adapt.

PG: Yes.

JA: Change of subject…what do you think of the new conventional wisdom that the American League is stronger than the National now?

PG: I think it is stronger. Offensively they have better offensive players than we do in the National League at the moment.

JA: Put ‘em in a World Series though and they execute like a Beer League Softball team…

He had to move on at that point. But you can use Gillick's wisdom as a
navigation tool, grist for your thinking in your own adaptation of plans to
shifting realities and situations. If any of us got that good, maybe there'd be
a place for us in baseball.

11/25/2006 12:24:00 PM posted by j @ 11/25/2006 12:24:00 PM

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Naples: Lessons for Business in MLB's Move to Audit Baseballs

I was in Naples (Florida) last week for the GMs' meeting, and as you probably wouldn't expect, it's an event where the front-office types mostly sit behind closed doors & media types get to stand around for hours trying not to look bovine, hoping for a scrap of news or a slug-batch of news or an interview with the teams' front-office types.

Something pretty exciting came out of it, at least for MBB types: an initiative that's pretty instructive for your own, non-baseball, efforts, especially to those of you in for-profit business. According to this story by Troy "Red Bull" Renck of the Denver Post:

Before arriving Sunday at the general managers' meetings, Joe Garagiola Jr. met with team equipment managers last week to determine how teams store their baseballs. The league would like more uniformity, which is why there will be discussion midweek about the feasibility of other clubs adding humidors, the computer-calibrated, climate-controlled shed used by the Rockies.

"We want to know where they go from the moment they arrive until they are used in the game," said Garagiola Jr., MLB's senior vice president of operations, Sunday afternoon. "We didn't know as much as we would like about how the baseballs are kept."

I got to talk a little with Garagiola, Jr. about a couple of issues including the handling of baseballs, and he's a very thoughtful, well-spoken guy. I didn't go into the specs for balls, but he did explain to a group of us some of the mechanics of collection.

How the ball is handled, its temperature in storage, the humidity of the storage, the relative humidity of the storage, the ambient humidity & temperature of the playing environment are all going to affect the ball's response in a game, though usually not very much in most situations. And the environment is going to affect how easy the ball is to control and how much bite the spin of the ball gets against the air. The logic of non-auditing except in Denver is reasonable on the surface: in most places, the honest differences won't make a very marked difference, but in Colorado, the low humidity makes a big difference that amplifies the effects of the altitude. So after playing a pinball variant of baseball for almost a decade, the Rox tried the humidor and found it drove the ball's performance towards the equivalent of how it responded elsewhere in the majors.

The Humidor has made a dramatic difference; we think it could make more of a difference if we were allowed to use it the way we’d like to use it. We have specifications we have to follow – where we store the baseballs and what (temperature) we can store them in. I believe if we were allowed to crank (humidity) up a little higher, it would have even more effect on the games.

So MLB has a specification for the handling of baseballs in Colorado, and a specification for the specs of baseballs everywhere, but except for tracking the Rockies' exceptional humidor-affected results, they apparently don't audit results.

Many people there made out that this audit process was not important. I disagree; measuring factors that dictate "fairness" in any competitive endeavor is the very core of assuring meritocracy. This was, I think, a truly important initiative.

REGULATION WITHOUT UNIFORM ENFORCEMENT...
...is a classic Tragedy of the Commons problem. It potentially rewards fudgers or outright cheaters while providing no possible margin for those who adhere to the specs. (If you don't know this concept, I strongly urge you to read the linked article; this, more than any other single article you'll ever read explains why most organizations are dysfunctional -- where it talks about farmers and cattle, insert managers and initiatives).

If you know regs or rules exist and you know that enforcement is either non-existent or lax or spotty, it actually pays to encourage people to adhere while fudging yourself.

Imagine you're as honest as can be expected in the real world and the GM of a team, say someone like Doug Melvin (salt of the earth). You know the regs are there so you do your best to conform to the League's standard. No advantage. Both teams play with the same ball performance.

Imagine you're competitive enough that tweaking the rules (not smashing them) gives you a little edge, say like Jeff Passan or Earl Weaver. Earl used to put all game balls in a chiller before games. Both teams played with a temperature-deadened ball, reducing potential offense and helping pitching. Fair in one way, that both teams still played with an identical ball, but Weaver believed a lower-scoring game advantaged his squad because he thought they were better at winning close low-scoring games. Plus he knew something his antagonist in the opponent's dugout didn't know.

Imagine you're only concerned with winning and think rules are for losers, say Ray Bullock. Without audit or enforcement, you could store half the game balls on Mercury and leave the other half immersed in liquid nitrogen and if you knew the usage norms, you could deliver batches of balls to the umps in a predetermined order. It wouldn't always align perfectly that your batters would get all the superjuiced balls while your pitchers would get the absolute zeroed ones, but in most games you'd have an edge.

If there are no rules, the "playing field" is leveled...anyone with intelligence and organization can harvest the same advantage. If the rules are monitored and enforced, it's a level playing field because eveyone has the same lack of personal advantage. It's when rules exist and there's no monitoring and enforcement that virtue is punished and rule-breaking rewarded.

BEYOND BASEBALL
This Tragedy of the Commons is why office politics are so destructive, and why in governmental regulations "voluntary standards" always punish the law-abiders and always reward the accountability-evaders in every area you can apply it. The Leninists will always trump the Kerenskyites who insist on palying by the rules, and those on the fence will see these powerful lessons and follow what they need to do to win, slowly making the situation less and less viable for the whole. And for the office politicos, they will always benefit from lax enforcement, because they will sluff work in favor of investing their time in campaigning, and if the system allows that, they will concentrate more power while behaving in ways that undermine the system.

If there are NO rules, everyone has the same chance, of course, to benefit by degrading the organization. In some situations, it can be a viable system, but not very often.

Do the healthy act -- be like MLB Operations and their headman, Garagiola: if you have rules, monitor and audit, measure compliance and enforce the rules.

11/18/2006 02:41:00 PM posted by j @ 11/18/2006 02:41:00 PM

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Four Coaching Lessons from John Sain: Via Jeff Merron & 108 Magazine

Johnny Sain,
solid but unspectacular pitcher and revolutionary pitching coach, died this
month. He was such a brilliant pitching coach and noble person that he's left a
whole corps of people, from Jim Bouton to Leo Mazzone who consider Sain their
prime mentor. They have been so appreciative of his human and teaching skills
that many spin his two great seasons and two very fine ones into memories of a
great pitching career. But there's little doubt that he was the most influential
pitching coach since World War II, and perhaps in the history of the game.

Most importantly, there are some great lessons from Sain in Merron's piece,
lessons in teaching that you can use in your own, non-baseball setting. Here are
four.

NOT IN-SAIN LESSON #1 - NEVER WASTE DOWNTIME; USE
IT FOR REFINING SKILLS
Denny McLain relates how after a long time trying to learn Sain's slider
technique, he mastered it during a workout on a day his start was rained out.

I can't tell you how predominant it is beyond baseball that interruptions or
failures that leave you work hours free (you go for a sales call and the
prospect decided not to show; the servers are all down again; the key person you
need for a meeting is late, et.al.) don't get applied well. People view those
hours as gifts to be played with, where in reality, they offer opportunities to
learn/teach. Tracking I've done in big organizations indicate there's a mean
average of a little over two hours out of a 47 hour week that get lost this way
when they could be turned into torque.

This tool is easy to apply. Just make a habit of having a Plan B for events,
a pile, ordered by importance, of work skills to master or practice, people to
instruct or from whom to learn. Reclaiming just half of that would provide an
extra 50 hours per year of training, a larger investment than most big
organizations make in training the talent -- and at no extra cost.

NOT IN-SAIN LESSON #2 - TO DELIVER THE BEST RESULTS,
ALIGN W/YOUR TRAINEES
Sain was a successful pitching coach who got fired a boatload of times. That as
the by-product of his insistence on aligning himself with his staffers, not
management. Obviously, one needs a balance. As I describe in the
book, if in cases where management's and your talent's interests don't align
well, you are too loyal to management, your roster knows it and won't give you
the extra effort that can make the difference between adequcy and excellence. On
the other hand, siding against management all the time is a CLM (Career-Limiting
Move), which Sain undoubtedly realized after his 2nd or perhaps 1st firing

Sain could have had an easier coaching career if he had been more
management's guy, but he wouldn't have been one of the great coaches of all time
with dozens of advocates who argue he should be in the Hall of Fame. In choosing
between impact and comfort, he chose impact.

NOT IN-SAIN LESSON #3 - PRACTICE KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT...
MAKE SURE YOU'RE LEARNING WHILE YOU'RE TEACHING
Sain always made himself open to learning while teaching...adding new methods
and insights even as he was passing wisdom on to his charges. As fellow coach
Hal Naragon said to Merron:

There's other ways to do it besides John
Sain's way. But his way has been very, very successful. John was always
willing to learn. Once he told me, "I learn as much from my pitchers as
they learn from me.” If he found a pitcher maybe making a movement with his
arm to make the ball sink a little better, well John wanted to know about it
right away.

NOT IN-SAIN LESSON #4 - TEACHING IS MORE THAN DRILLING;
IT'S ABOUT THE TRAINEE EMBRACING
As Jim Bouton says in the Merron interview, "He wouldn’t tell you what to
do. His genius was that he would make you think." This is a lesson I know
and still struggle with. When you just know something and you're trying to teach
it to someone who doesn't, the temptation is to drill, push enforce. And if the
recipient isn't getting it, the fallback is what I call Nixon Bombing Haiphong
(when your approach fails, just turn up the intensity). Sain understood and got
monster results from two generations of pitchers in leading to the conclusion,
not imposing.

Rick Peterson and Don Cooper both do this; their norm is to let the pitcher
come to them for help, not reach out. Peterson was able to remake Tom Glavine
late in the 2005 season, as he told me and was documented
by Murray Chass by hanging back and not approaching until he was competely
sure that Glavine, having been hammered into a Fullujah-pile by the lowly
Seattle Mariners' lineup, was ready to embrace change.

Beyond baseball, we don't always have time to leave this slack, waiting for
the talent to learn what they need to know to help us ramp up performance, but
it almost always works better when we can.

John Sain is one of the seminal figures of modern baseball. There are few
finer rôles to play than being the person who remade a profession and is
recognized for it. Like all of us, Sain's body was mortal, but unlike most of
us, his consciousness is replicated across an entire line of work.

11/12/2006 11:44:00 AM posted by j @ 11/12/2006 11:44:00 AM

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Adam Dunn: The Rewards & Risks of Refining Outliers

You can never do just one
thing
--Garrett Hardin

In making adjustments to complex systems, as biologist Garrett Hardin says,
you can never do just one thing. Classic case in wildlife biology is the
Australia's seemingly clever counter-attack on the native cane beetle...a
non-native cane toad to chow down on 'em. Two problems: the cane toad is baboon
butt ugly, looking
exactly like some weird bio-engineered synthesis of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Cal)
and Rep. Denny Hastert (R-Ill), and without any natural predators, there are
even fewer organisms willing to eat it to keep its population down than those
willing to eat the deep-fried burritos the Baltimore Memorial Stadium concession
stands used to sell.

The more unusual the system, the more risky it is to pull on a pick-up
stick...if you don't think it through, it's likely to come crashing down, and if
you do think it through, it might just fool you and do it anyway. Normal
everyday systems respond better to crisp pre-planning, but the outliers on your
staff roster, the ones who have unusual palettes of talents or eccentric
personalities or work styles are very risky to experiment with. That doesn't
mean you shouldn't experiment, by the way, especially when their results could
be better, but it means there's a goodly amount of risk that generally
outweighs the potential reward.

So it's with a little concern, but a bit of hope, too, that I read that new
Cincinnati Reds batting coach Brook Jacoby is looking to address team slugger
Adam Dunn's way-over- the- top-strikeout rate (about 183 per season). Dunn is an
outlier the way a Taliban Convention in Vegas is an outlier. He's a platypus
amongst ducks, a Starbucks in South Dakota.

Brook Jacoby will work on
fine-tuning the other 24 players' swings, too, but his prior experience
working with Adam Dunn could prove his biggest asset.The
Reds hired Jacoby as their hitting coach Friday, hoping his well-rounded
approach will help Dunn and others rebound from a late-season collapse that
doomed Cincinnati's playoff chances.

Jacoby spent the previous four
seasons tutoring hitters in the Texas organization, but spent three years in
the Reds' farm system prior to that. Among his pupils was Dunn, whom Jacoby
first encountered in 2000 when the outfielder was in Dayton and the former
big-league third baseman was the Reds' roving hitting instructor. They also
worked together in Louisville the following season.

Jacoby said on a conference
call Friday that he has some ideas for working with Dunn. Will cutting down
on the slugger's strikeout total be among the talking points?

"I consider 194 of them a
little bit of an issue," said Jacoby. "If he were to put the ball
in play a little more, I'm sure it would mean some more RBIs and possibly
some more hits. It might be an approach thing with him with two strikes; it
might be a mechanical thing. I'll have to sit down and talk to him and we'll
figure it out. I'd like to think something could be improved there."

In some ways, Dunn is the Reds' most potent hitter. He uses most of his
6'6" frame to swing very hard. He gets great leverage and has had at least
40 homers in each of the last three seasons. He's part of one of the two
clusters of persistent strikeout victims: he's patient, tending to see about
4.25 pitches per plate appearance compared to his league's norm of 3.82. He's
not a member of the swing at anything crowd; he walks over 100 times in a
typical campaign. (Here's
some great analysis, beautifully presented, from Cyclone792 at the Reds Zone
weblog on Dunn's approach). But by trying to work the pitcher into a
hitter's count, he gets deep enough into at bats to get to two strike counts,
and once he does that, with his tall physique creating a big strike zone, he's becomes
Sir Whiff A Lot.

SEASON

PA

AB

HR

HR
%

BB

BB%

SO

SO%

AVG

OBP

SLG

OPS

2001

286

244

19

7%

38

13%

74

26%

0.262

0.371

0.578

0.949

2002

676

535

26

4%

128

19%

170

25%

0.249

0.400

0.454

0.854

2003

469

381

27

6%

74

16%

126

27%

0.215

0.354

0.465

0.819

2004

681

568

46

7%

108

16%

195

29%

0.266

0.388

0.569

0.957

2005

671

543

40

6%

114

17%

168

25%

0.247

0.387

0.540

0.927

2006

683

561

40

6%

112

16%

194

28%

0.234

0.365

0.490

0.855

Total

3466

2832

198

6%

574

17%

927

27%

0.245

0.380

0.513

0.893

There aren't a lot of batters like Dunn -- 44% of his plate appearances end
without a ball being put in play (walk or whiff) and at the same time, he's a
potent slugger, a bit like Darryl
Strawberry but better (a bunch more walks, a handful fewer whiffs).

But he's not a superstar. The Reds have had a feast or famine kind of
offense, and there's nothing more feast or famine than the strikeout/homer
combo. He might be more in the specific context of the Reds team if he yielded a
few dozen Ks and a couple of homers to snare a handful of extra less prodigious
hits in specific situations. In general, there aren't very many players
who produce offense at the rate Dunn does.

Note in the chart above the admirable consistency of the lad's output after
his partial campaign as a rookie in 2001. The consistency's especially
pronounced in the BB%, K% and HR%.

So he's an outlier in two dimensions: how he achieves what he does, and how
uniformly he continues to produce.

BEYOND BASEBALL (we'll come back to Dunn)
This two-dimensions of outlier makes him a particularly risky candidate to
tinker with. I've seen a few cases of this in my consulting. I was brought into
an aerospace-related concern that had lower productivity than they wanted in an
office that produced analysis reports. They believed there was a lack of
discipline in the office because there was a lot of overtime booked, more than
normal days-off taken and because they didn't get the normal early drafts a
month or so before the final.

When I nosed around, I saw that one of the researchers was responsible for a
vast percentage of (a) the work output, (b) the overtime, and (c) the extra
days-off. It was his work pattern (the other three analysts were near the norm
for all three, he alone was skewing the totals). The workhorse researched a lot
up front, started writing late in the process. When he was on a roll, he'd stay
late as long as he was productive. After a project was delivered, he tended to
take some "mental health" days. He was a high-performer but an outlier
in both his work hours and his pattern of grinding through a lot of research
before committing it to paper (ergo, no moth-before draft). But he was the
departmental asset.

They wanted to cut off his overtime and make him deliver an early draft a
month before the review draft. This was one consult where I was successful in
getting this client to bend to their high-performer's pattern. He just wouldn't
have been able to produce as much or as well if forced to conform to formal
"norms" that were essentially irrelevant to the deliverable's
timeliness or quality. I suggested that if they wanted to change his
approach to high-performance work, they needed to do it in ways he'd already
proved himself good at...that is, cherry-pick other practices of his that he'd
done better before than he was doing now. It's not guaranteed to work, but it's
less risky, and can sometimes remind a staffer of some practice she's set down
and forgotten about.

NOT DUNN WITH ADAM YET
The equivalent tool for Dunn might be the following. Between 2005 and
2006, his OPS dropped markedly in specific two-strike counts, not all of them.

OPS

0-2

1-2

2-2

3-2

2005

.417

.334

.497

.887

2006

.235

.379

.469

.783

As you can see, there's essentially no difference in the OPS value of the
outcomes of Dunn's plate appearances that resolved on pitches thrown on 1-2 and
2-2 counts. But there's a big shear-off in 3-2 pitches resolved and a monstrous
one of 0-2. But there's a context that's important to note, too. Dunn had fewer
0-2 pitches resolving plate appearances in 2006 (38 instead of 48). That may be
the result of intent -- being a little more careful in trying to avoid 0-2 with
certain kinds of pitchers, or it might be noise. And he had 90 appearances
resolved at 3-2 in 2006, compared to 80 in 2005. Again, perhaps a different work
style or perhaps noise.

But as a coach, it's well worth asking the players on your rosters how this
might have come about. Since Dunn's homers are half as frequent at 0-2 and 1-2
counts as they are in other appearances, it might be worth seeing if he
could develop a special two strike swing that the many top sluggers incorporate
(Ted Simmons & Rico Carty, for example, told me they did this). But there's
no more guarantee Dunn can add this to his repertoire without degrading his
success in other situations than it is the aerospace analyst could work 8-5 and
deliver early drafts and still produce at the high level he had been.

When the talent is the product, you always take a chance trying to make
successful producers more productive by changing that which may be the root
cause of the their success.

Have you succeeded with that in the past? Failed? Do you find it hard to
leave your Adam Dunn's alone or to find the formula to make them even more
productive?